[Python-Dev] Garbage announcement printed on interpreter shutdown

[Daniel Stutzbach]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:

> IMO this runs contrary to the decision we made when DeprecationWarnings
> were
> made silent by default: it spews messages not only at developers, but also
> at
> users, who don't need it and probably are going to be quite confused by it,
> assuming it came from their console application (imagine Mercurial printing
> this).
>

A non-empty gc.garbage often indicates that there is a bug in the program
and that it is probably leaking memory [1].  That's a little different from
a DeprecationWarning which doesn't indicate a bug; it just indicates that
the program might not run correctly using a future version of Python.  I
think a better comparison would be with exceptions throw from a __del__,
which (as far as I know) are still printed to the console.

+1 on adding a way to enable/disable the feature.
-1 on removing the feature
-0 on making it disabled by default

[1] I know that some large, long-running programs periodically check
gc.garbage and carefully choose where to break cycles, but those are the
exception and not the rule.
--
Daniel Stutzbach, Ph.D.
President, Stutzbach Enterprises, LLC <http://stutzbachenterprises.com>
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